NEAR Intents stopped its services on October 1 after detecting a security incident that drained about 3.8 million USD. The team traced the problem to a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract.

"The preliminary report indicates the total loss of approximately $3.8M. These funds will be compensated in full," the team said.

What Went Wrong

The flaw sat in the link between two systems. Omni is the infrastructure that handles deposits and withdrawals between NEAR Intents and outside blockchains. A bug in its interaction with the NEAR Intents contract allowed unauthorised withdrawals, with irregular outflows detected from a BNB Chain hot wallet.

The contract side vulnerability has since been patched. NEAR Intents and near.com were expected to resume operations within about one hour of the announcement.

11 Networks Stay Paused Longer

Deposits and withdrawals on 11 networks were set to remain unavailable for roughly 12 more hours while the team finished fixes to the Omni infrastructure. The affected networks are BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, LayerX, Adi, Scroll and Plasma.

Users holding assets from those chains inside NEAR Intents, for example in HOT Wallet or on near.com, were not left stuck. Once NEAR Intents came back online, they could swap those assets into other tokens while direct withdrawals to the affected chains stayed paused.

Where The Funds Went

The stolen funds moved quickly. According to onchain investigator ZachXBT, "The funds were immediately transferred to Kucoin and bridged to Bitcoin." The route ran from the BNB Chain hot wallet to the KuCoin exchange and then across a bridge into Bitcoin.

Sending funds through a centralised exchange can help investigators, since exchanges can freeze accounts and share data with law enforcement. NEAR Intents said it has reported the incident to law enforcement and is working with security and blockchain analytics partners to trace the funds and pursue recovery. A detailed report is set to be published in the coming days.

Market Reaction

The NEAR token dropped 7.5 percent within minutes of the announcement, touching a low of 4.76 USD before recovering slightly to 4.84 USD.

The relatively small size of the loss, together with the immediate promise of full compensation, limited the wider fallout. Users who lost funds should not need to take action to be made whole, though the exact compensation process is expected to be explained in the upcoming report.

What NEAR Intents Does

NEAR Intents is a cross chain trading protocol built around intents. Instead of manually bridging and swapping across networks, a user states what they want, such as swapping one asset on one chain for another asset on a different chain. Competing solvers then bid to fill that request, and the user does not need to deal with the steps in between.

The protocol has grown fast. All time transaction volume rose from 5 billion USD in November 2025 to 10 billion USD in January 2026 and passed 20 billion USD by June 3, 2026. It has processed more than 25 million swaps and generated about 32 million USD in cumulative fees. Wallets such as HOT Wallet, Zashi and Ledger support it, and near.com serves as a front end.

That growth also explains the incident. The more chains a protocol connects, the more deposit and withdrawal infrastructure it has to run, and each connection adds a place where a bug can sit. In this case the smart contract logic was not the only weak point. The problem was in the handoff between the contract and the infrastructure that moves assets in and out.

A Pattern In Cross Chain Exploits

The NEAR Intents incident follows a run of cross chain and hot wallet losses in recent weeks. In August, The Sandbox lost about 14.7 million SAND from bridge contracts on Base and BNB Smart Chain, and in late September crypto casino Duelbits lost around 7 million USD from its hot wallets. In each case, the weak point was the infrastructure that moves funds between systems rather than the main application.

Like The Sandbox, NEAR Intents moved quickly to promise full compensation, which has become the expected response from larger platforms that can cover the loss from their own treasury.

What It Means For Web3 Gaming

Chain abstraction tools like NEAR Intents are part of how web3 games try to hide the complexity of moving assets between networks. Players want to buy items or cash out rewards without thinking about bridges, and intent based systems promise exactly that. The incident is a reminder that the convenience still depends on bridge and custody infrastructure in the background. For studios, it shows the value of choosing partners that patch quickly and cover user losses, and for players, it is another argument for not leaving large balances inside any single cross chain service longer than needed.